Dead Reckoning
"Dead Reckoning" is the thirteenth episode of season 2, and overall the thirty-sixth produced hour of Person of Interest. It originally aired on January 31, 2013 Synopsis Reese is abducted by an old acquaintance planning a massive act of cyber-warfare that could lead to Reese’s death. — TV listing Flashback In 2011, Stanton was recovering from her injuries during the Ordos mission. She is contacted by a man who had been following her CIA activities (and appears to have knowledge of the Machine). She figures he is not part of China's Ministry of State Security (MSS), but cannot identify him any further. Using the tale of the mythical Titans as an analogy, he offers her a chance to get revenge, not only against Snow, but against the man who initially sold the laptop necessitating the Ordos mission. Present Lying inside a crashed car, Carter awakens to the sound of a cell phone ringing. She answers Finch, who had been trying to contact her shortly after the crash. He instructs her to flee the scene—going against police procedure—to avoid possible consequences. The next morning, Reese awakens on a city bus across from his abductor, Kara Stanton. He finds he is rigged with a bomb vest similar to Mark Snow, who is sitting beside him, and is coerced into doing tasks for Stanton. Police arrive on the scene of the car crash, discovering Special Agent Donnelly's body. Fusco is present on scene and calls Carter over—from a dropped earring, he deduced that Carter had fled the scene prior to his arrival. They meet with Finch, who presents them with Stanton's bio, and discover that she had sent Snow to steal an NSA-certified hard drive from Fujima Electronics. Reese and Snow arrive at a warehouse to fetch an item for Stanton. The seller presents them with the aforementioned hard drive, but demands a higher price. Stanton remotely instructs them to kill the seller, but Reese refuses. Before the seller can press the matter further, he and his partner are sniped. Stanton had been observing them, and reminds the pair to follow her instructions. While at a diner, Stanton taunts Reese about his new role, noting that he is refusing to eat as a form of rebellion. She notes that Snow—eating a hamburger—had also refused meals at first, but has since resigned to his fate. Reese says that his opposition will be more overt. They immediately set on their next task, following a pair of ATF agents to obtain their uniforms. They respond to one of the agent's phone call, instructing them to respond to a bomb threat (called in by Stanton) at a nearby building. Before disposing of the phone, Reese uses it to text Carter. Carter hears of the bomb threat, and Finch investigates the target building. Although listing only twenty floors, Finch discovers that the 21st floor is registered to a shell corporation operated by the Department of Defense. Hacking the DoD from Times Square, he also discovers that the location houses a cyber-security installation and cyber-warfare development lab. Reese and Snow enter the building but are stopped by a policeman. Reese demands passage, alluding to the Semtex explosives strapped to their torsos. With guidance from Stanton, they use a special elevator to access the 21st floor, defeating two Delta Force guards posted at the entry. Struggling to detain one of the guards, Snow threatens him at gunpoint, but Reese talks him out of killing. Carter and Fusco arrive at the building. They offer to help clear the stairwells in order to actually reach the 21st floor by stairs. They reach the facility's Applied Research lab which contains cyber-weapons, not bioweapons as Snow suspects. Stanton drives the men on by activating a 15 minute detonation timer. Inside, they coerce a departing lab technician into granting them entry into the SCIF containing the weapons cache (a bank of servers isolated from the Internet). Reese attempts to talk Snow out of the plan, noting that they are out of Stanton's listening range. Snow refuses, confiding that he hasn't been able to escape from Stanton's bomb vest. Snow proceeds with the plan to install the hard drive by using a workstation to locate an unused drive bay. Reese takes the technician aside and gains his cooperation. He also takes the opportunity to contact Finch. Together, the three of them deduce that Stanton could potentially take down the entire Internet (as well as the Machine). The tech reveals that the server is designed to securely erase itself if it is compromised. Reese jumps on the opportunity, aggravating Snow. Both are surprised by the deactivation of their vests—Stanton was trailing shortly behind them the whole while, and merely needed them to gain entry herself. Moving her captives to the facility's cyber-security monitoring center, Stanton uploads the drive's contents. Reese tries to talk her out of the plan, but she refuses and locks them inside with re-armed vests. The technician offers more help by revealing how to unlock the door. Reese tries one last time to convince Snow to at least get clear of innocent people before the bombs blow, but Snow stuns him and flees. Carter and Fusco arrive; she attempts to disarm the vest, but Reese and Fusco convince her to flee as well. Resolving to not let others be harmed, Reese exits to the roof, intending to wait out the timer. He instead runs into Finch, who accepts the hard drive, but is not deterred by Reese threatening to shoot him. Finch talks Reese into letting him attempt to disarm the vest. Although not trained in bomb disposal, he is able to analyze the circuitry and sets to work on the locked phone. Using the phone's IMEI code, he obtains five potential unlock codes, and with three chances succeeds in using the correct one to disarm the bomb. Stanton returns to her car to receive her payment: the identity of the man who sold the laptop. The mysterious man wishes her luck, as the man responsible does not exist in any public record. Before she can act on the intel, she is cornered by Snow, who gets his revenge by dying together in his bomb's explosion. Happily reuniting with Bear, Reese asks if Finch has figured out what the malware uploaded by Stanton was designed to do. Finch remarks on the difficulty of the decryption process, only being able to obtain the payload's activation date as being five months from now. Back at the police station, Special Agent Moss reveals to Carter that they have identified the "suicide bombers", and have also identified Snow as the "Man in the Suit" and closed that case. Fusco asked if Carter was okay—both remain skeptical. In the end flashback of the blast in which Stanton and Snow died is shown and it is revealed that the Stanton was told by the mysterious man that the name of the man responsible as Harold Finch. Trivia Dead Reckoning: a technique of orienting a map without using a compass, by looking at the surrounding environment. Predictive calculation based on inference; guesswork. This episode mentioned malware software known as Stuxnet & Flame, respectively. Malware is by defintion, potentially unwanted programs(s) (PUP), whose purpose is to either control computing equipment for nefarious ends, or to destroy (or steal data). Both, Stuxnet & Flame, share some of the following similarities: a) the infection of computer systems seem to highly concentrated in the Middle East & North Africa, especially Iran b) the nature of the source code is so sophisticated and well-coordinated that it likely was created and conducted with "nation-state support", smart money is on either Isreal/USA or both combined. c) the programs share some striking resemblances to each other with respect to some of the modules of their respective source code itself, which implies common point of origin. Stuxnet, is a computer worm, which is a program which can spread without the aid of being attached to another. Its goal was to spy and control industrial systems which are suppose to monitor and govern physical processes in real-time. More specifically, the worm targeted the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC for short,essentially a computer on a circuit board, which had all the necessary hardware and software spread out as microchips across the board. It is suppose to gather sensor data & apply adjustment to industrial processes such as flow rate, pressure & temp) by way of the project files used by SCADA systems (supervisory control and data acquisition, its job is to oversee the these PLC(s), which could be easily distributed across a plant and/or multiple sites, through the received PLC sensor data). By changing, the project files employed by SCADA software, you can reprogram the PLC(s) to do as you please. With respect to case of Iran, this "bad code" had the ability to look for a specific PLC model (the model check is required due to the variations of machine level instructions across different PLC devices). Once the target device has been identified and infected, Stuxnet gains the control to intercept all data flowing into or out of the PLC, including the ability to tamper with that data. Stuxnet attacked the SCADA systems by utilizing uses zero-day exploits (hackers take advantage of undocumented vunerabilites) to install a rootkit (programs that conceal malicious code’s access to files, folders and registry keys, or entrys on a list which contains a computer's hardware, software as well as authorized users ) which in turn logs in to the SCADA's database and steals design and control files. Promo References es:Dead Reckoning 212 212